Inverted Transgressives

Earlier this year I read John Gray’s somewhat scattershot polemic, The New Leviathans: Thoughts After Liberalism. Now that we have been through the US election it does seem to me that Gray was hitting the mark more than I perhaps imagined at time.

It was thanks to one specific chapter that I undertook to read Dostoevsky’s Demons, a novel I had previously been deterred from approaching by an article I had read about all the supposedly worthy books in the canon which some people don’t actually find all that worth the effort after all.

I have been very pleasantly surprised by the sarky tone of the narration, having perhaps expected something a lot ‘heavier’. (To be fair The Devils/Demons/Possessed does not particularly suggest a glib-toned read.)

Anyway, Gray recommends the novel with an important caveat: we are not to bother ourselves with all the crazy, toxic nonsense Dostoevsky himself signed up for, but rather with the way he sends up the pretensions of the self-styled rationalists he detested. And with this statement, he reinforces a notion we sometimes lose sight of: both sides of any cultural argument can be talking out of their backsides.

The problem with unbelievers, Dostoevsky concluded, is that they often espouse a form of atheism that is in a sense a flight from a godless world, where apparently rationalist or humanist ideals are made to fill the void left by religious bunkum.

One of the eponymous demons of the story is a young man utterly convinced of his own independence of mind, who spends a lot of time spouting recycled claptrap.

The key delusion of these Russian ‘nihilists’ (so called because they believed that nothing mattered except science) was the commitment to totally free themselves from all constraints (history, custom, biology even) embarking on a programme of self-creation, from scratch, and this is surely one of the main reasons that this novel is so relevant to the liberal (or 'after’ liberal) discourse of our own time.

Ten days after Trump’s win, Silicon Valley behemoth Peter Thiel gave an interview in which he touched on some of the same themes, alluding to what he saw as the main reasons for a 'preference cascade' against the Democrats and their progressive project...

"The left became like Imperial Stormtroopers — identical, programmed, no individual thought." 

Remember, acknowledging that he could be right about this, is not the same thing as feeling obliged to endorse his own political vision.

One difference I have noted in my reading of both Gray and Dostoevsky in 2024 is that the ‘free thinkers’ of the late nineteenth century loved nothing more than being called out for being ‘transgressive’ — boy did they wallow in the notoriety — whereas our own contemporary variety seem to like nothing more than ostracising anyone who opposes them as a dangerous, hate-filled crank. This time it is they who are the ‘normals’, and everyone else is somehow weird and defective.

This is perhaps a sub-plot to the more general observation that can be made of their speech: the more the hyper-liberals talk, the more of what they say becomes a kind of inversion of what the majority are likely to regard as factual.

And the majority have started to make use of that condition and its democratic authority to respond to the bullying and intellectual disdain that they have been treated to.